The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees--physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications. Only twenty-five percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. This volume contains the papers presented at the December 2005 meeting, held in Vancouver.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First PASCAL (pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning) Machine Learning Challenges Workshop, MLCW 2005, held in Southampton, UK in April 2005.
The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from about 50 submissions. The papers reflect the concepts of three challenges dealt with in the workshop: finding an assessment base on the uncertainty of predictions using classical statistics, Bayesian inference, and statistical learning theory; the second challenge was to recognize objects from a number of visual object classes in realistic scenes; the third challenge of recognizing textual entailment addresses semantic analysis of language to form a generic framework for applied semantic inference in text understanding.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems